What information to reveal, when?

In watching Christopher Smith's movie Triangle on Saturday, there were (appropriately) three instances when I was inspired to reveal information about the film that maybe I shouldn't have. One was before the film and two were during. Two also (not the same two) were instances where I actually revealed the info, and in one instance I kept my mouth shut.

But let me start by telling you a thing or two about this film, which worked very well for me despite the fact that a close scrutiny of its narrative structure might uncover all sorts of logical flaws.

A group of six friends (three men, three women) leave a Florida harbor on a beautiful morning for a day of sailing. Included in these friends is a woman (Melissa George) who seems a bit shell-shocked, like she can't exactly remember the events leading up to this moment in time. As they get out on the water, some unusual changes in the weather -- which seem localized to exactly where they are on the water -- portend ominous things to come.

Which is all I really want to say about it until I've given you a spoiler warning. Here it is: Mild spoilers to follow, but only about the kind of movie it is, not about actual things that happen in the plot. So in other words, you won't be too disappointed if you keep reading, and it shouldn't affect your enjoyment -- especially if you realize that the triangle of the title is the Bermuda Triangle, where weird things are always afoot.

1.

Triangle had come up for discussion in the Flickchart group on Facebook sometime in the past year. The larger theme of the discussion was: mind-bender movies you may not have seen, which may or may not have to do with time travel. Also discussed were Timecrimes and Primer, the former of which I love and the latter of which I most certainly do not love.

It's rare enough these days that my wife and I watch movies together -- two a week at most -- that I feel like I need to sell each suggestion to her in order for her to agree to it. I probably don't; in fact, she loves not knowing anything about a particular film before she sees it. But when I've got a movie I want to watch, I immediately start planning out the sales pitch, to make the movie seem more enticing to her. So in this case I explained that the movie had come up in a discussion of Timecrimes and Primer.

My wife didn't balk at the information, or tell me she wished I hadn't revealed it. But as we started watching, I wished I hadn't revealed it. Knowing that other people had compared this movie to two time travel movies, I was immediately second guessing everything I saw on screen, instead of being lulled into a false sense of the movie's straightforwardness by what seemed like an ordinary boating trip on a beautiful Florida day. In fact, before the movie started, I hadn't even known that Triangle referred to the Bermuda Triangle. So if I hadn't known there was going to be a supernatural element at play, I mightn't have suspected anything from this innocent beginning.

Of course, I had to know something was up because I knew it was a thriller/horror. Clearly this was not going to be a movie about people taking a pleasant sail and then returning home unscathed.

So how much is too much? You need some information to get you in the door. Without movie websites telling you things like "People who liked this also liked this," you might not even know a particular movie existed. In fact, that may have been how those who recommended Triangle to me learned about it in the first place. Maybe they saw Timecrimes, and then Triangle was recommended as a similar movie. (Note: If you are worried that I have spoiled Triangle for you in some way, worry not -- calling it similar to Timecrimes and Primer is in many ways a red herring, and the very specific thing it has in common with Timecrimes is not what you would expect at all.)

My wife, who didn't like the movie as much as I did, didn't scold me one bit for telling her that it was similar to these other movies. She didn't say it affected her expectations, or anything like that; in fact, she didn't mention this advanced knowledge whatsoever. She did, however, scold me about yet again taking her out of a movie by identifying one of the actors as someone who once appeared in something else.

2.

See, one of the compulsive things I do that pisses my wife off the most is to point out actors on screen as the movie is going. "Hey, it's so-and-so." Or "Hey, that's the guy who was in such-and-such."

Objectively, it's an annoying habit. I will own that. But certain viewing companions -- my wife not being one of them -- would actually benefit from something like this. If they are like me, they get something out of recognizing that this actor appeared in that other movie, and they want to know about it at the time so they can appreciate it. If they are like me, they like figuring out the way the cinematic universe fits together like a jigsaw puzzle, how many degrees people are removed from each other, and the twists and turns in people's careers.

My wife, however, represents the much more sizable majority of viewers who want to get lost in the movie, and see that person only as a character. The nerve.

I may be slow on the uptake, but believe me, by now I know that my wife doesn't countenance such interruptions. Especially since she gave me a pretty definitive tongue-lashing (with a half smile, of course) on the subject recently. However, Triangle represented what I considered to be an exception to the rule -- and I want to see if you agree with me.

One of the three men aboard the sailboat in Triangle is an actor named Henry Nixon. There is nothing exceptional about Mr. Nixon -- his is the smallest of the three male roles, and though he performs more than capably in the movie, no one is specifically going to remember him from his work in this film.

Except, there is one thing exceptional about him to us: We've met him.

Nixon is an Australian, like both Triangle's lead (Melissa George) and my wife. And not just any Australian, but an Australian who appeared in the movie Noise, which was directed by my wife's good friend Matthew Saville. Noise appeared at Sundance in 2007, and as such, so did Henry Nixon and my wife and me. Considering the despicable character he plays in Noise, we were glad to see that Henry (I think we can call him that) is a really affable guy without an ounce of ego about him. We spent the better part of an evening with him while we were there.

Because of this connection, I thought my wife would want to know the very moment I identified who he was, which came probably 30 minutes into the film. I figured she would want to know that this was a person we had met and liked, as that would allow her to see his performance through a slightly different lens. It was time sensitive, and even though she warned me as I was doing it, I overrode her warnings for what I thought was her own good.

Turns out, she still didn't want to know. When we discussed it afterward, she told me I could have just waited until the movie was over. But according to my thinking, she would have by then missed her opportunity to watch this guy as he was doing his thing. If she hadn't known she needed to pay special attention to him, she might have had a hard time going back and considering his performance in retrospect.

Okay, well, now I know for the next time we see a movie featuring someone we know.

3.

The third thing is kind of a silly thing, and this is the thing I did not mention to my wife.

At some point in the second act of the movie, I noticed that there had been an inordinate number of shots of Melissa George turning dramatically toward the camera. I think you can imagine what I'm talking about: You start on the back of her head, then she turns around and faces the camera, either to display a look of horror or to deliver a weighty line of dialogue.

I started to notice it so much that I almost thought it was worth pointing out. That way, if this shot then happened a half-dozen more times, we could laugh about it.

There were two main reasons I didn't: 1) I had already been scolded about the Henry Nixon incident; 2) I was enjoying this movie, and didn't want it to become the subject of ridicule.

However, let's say I did want it to become the subject of ridicule. Wouldn't I want to get everybody on the same page, so we could all have a fun time ridiculing it? That might turn the experience from a dull one to one we might remember years from now.

I think of when my wife and I watched Crazy Heart with another couple. Unbeknownst to each other for the first half of the movie, we were all suffering through the viewing, finding falsehood upon falsehood, one unintentionally hilarious moment after another. Then, fortuitously, someone ventured a snide remark, and everyone else chimed in with an equal passion for how little they were enjoying the film. This opened the flood gates, and allowed us to openly crack wise about the movie. I remember laughing and laughing and ultimately having a very fun time -- which doesn't make me feel any more fondly about the movie, only the experience of watching it.

But it can be a risk to take the movie into the MST3K realm. First off, you have to read the room. You have to pick up on the shifting bodies, the sighs, the mild scoffs, to be sure that others are in agreement. Then you've got to pick just the right moment to point out something absurd in the film, and see if your vocal interruption is welcomed or rebuffed.

With Triangle, I didn't want to take it to the level of ridicule, because I was really enjoying the movie. My wife might have actually taken it and ran with it, since she didn't get as much out of the movie as I did. But I didn't want the numerous shots of Melissa George doing a 180 to be our defining memory of the film.

So I did something that I can, surprisingly, do when I want to:

I kept my trap shut.

Conflict of interest

I am on the verge of writing my first film review in which I have a potential conflict of interest.

First, a little background.

Among my wife's friends in Australia are a couple filmmakers who may be on the verge of making it big. They're a married couple -- a director (let's call him Mark) and a composer (let's call her Beatrice) -- who both had a good list of credits in Australian television, but had also collaborated on several shorts and (I believe) one feature. In 2006 they were hard at work on a second feature, called Noise, which Mark wrote and directed, and for which Beatrice composed the music. Noise is about a Melbourne police officer who has tinnitus, the ailment that causes a permanent ringing in one's ears, and the ways in which he becomes involved with two high-profile (and possibly linked) murder cases, while he is also grappling with his hearing becoming further and further degraded.

Noise was accepted at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, where it was well received. Some of the people receiving it well were my wife and I, who traveled to Park City, Utah just for the purpose of seeing it -- and for the rare opportunity to see Mark and Beatrice, of course. In fact, we slept in the extra double bed in their hotel room. The producing team was angling for a release in the U.S., but sadly, it never transpired -- even though, after emerging from the theater, I eagerly proclaimed that such a release would be a foregone conclusion. (And no, I do not think I jinxed the film.)

As is my custom, I put in to review Noise right after returning from Sundance -- almost three years ago now. Since the film did not have a fixed release date, my editor suggested that I just write the synopsis for the movie now, and wait until it was released to write the review. I also pitched the idea of interviewing Mark for a feature on the website, but not with much enthusiasm -- since he was unknown in the U.S., an interview with him wouldn't be a very exciting draw for most readers, so my access to him was not a very useful selling point.

So I wrote the Noise synopsis, and waited for its U.S. theatrical release. (It was released in the theaters in Australia and got great reviews.) That U.S. release eventually came on DVD, at which point, I was eligible to review it. In most cases, I don't feel the need to revisit a movie before reviewing it, even if a year or more has elapsed. In fact, when I first started writing for this website, I routinely submitted reviews for films I had not seen in ten years, though you can understand if I was a little vague on specifics. At that point, they just needed content, and I was there to provide it.

However, since I know Mark and Beatrice, I wanted to give Noise a second viewing before I wrote the review. I knew my review would be glowing, but I also wanted to be sure I could latch on to specifics, to make it the best possible review it could be. After all, it's not every day that you know for certain that the person who directed the film will be reading your review.

As sometimes happens, though -- and perhaps it was this subconscious pressure of writing the perfect review -- my second viewing of Noise made its way to the back burner. I got approved to review it some time ago, but it just didn't make it to the top of my online queue until late summer. (And the filmmakers should be pleased to know that you can get Noise through Blockbuster, thank you very much.) Since late summer, my wife and I have both been very busy, and I knew this was a movie she wanted to see again with me. After all, they're her friends -- my friends my proxy, though I'm quite fond of them as well. Plus, the subject matter of Noise is quite heavy, so it never felt like the soothing balm of dumb escapism we usually needed to relax from our busy schedule. We were trying to wait for the perfect time and place for our second viewing.

Not that we're any less busy, but we finally found that time this past Sunday. (Ironically, it was about two-and-a-half weeks after the director himself was in town for meetings with Hollywood types, during which we had dinner with him, and I told him that I was about to review the movie.) Not that there was any doubt, but the second viewing confirmed that Noise is a very good film.

Knowing various members of the crew as we did -- at Sundance, we met and hung out with the producer, the DP, and several actors -- we decided we should definitely check out the DVD extras to see what was there. Lo and behold, there was a making-of doco (to use the Australian slang for documentary) shot mostly by Mark himself. I say "mostly," because as it turns out, my wife shot some of the footage as well. That's right, it was with surprise and delight that we were suddenly looking at familiar footage from our Sundance weekend, where my wife did some videoing and actually asked Mark a few questions. So her voice is in the film as well. I was even on the lookout for whether I might find myself in the background of one of the shots, but I never did. The doco also contained an extended interview with the film's editor (let's call him Greg), who is also one of my wife's friends, and has become my friend through our mutual obsessive love of films -- though I've met him in person only once, briefly. In fact, before the doco, I'd forgotten that Greg was even the editor of Noise -- hence my failure to include him in this piece before now.

As I was taking all this in, I thought, "Wow, I may really have a genuine conflict of interest on this film."

But what is a conflict of interest when it comes to reviewing films, really? Are you supposed to recuse yourself when you know some of the participants? If so, how does someone like Roger Ebert handle that situation? In a 30+ year career, he has certainly met hundreds if not thousands of actors, writers, directors and producers, and presumably developed a friendly relationship with some of them. Does he question his own ability to submit an impartial review when these people appear in a film, or behind the camera?

The thing is, I'm probably one of the only ones -- though I can now include you, dear readers, in that group -- who knows that I have some sort of personal stake in this film. There's little chance that my editor remembers that I know the director (and composer, and editor) of Noise, a film that is probably not even on his radar. So the question is not really one of professional ethics, or at least not in terms of ethics where I have a chance of getting caught and paying some kind of price for my actions. Even if my editor knew I knew the director, I'm sure he wouldn't care. In fact, at the time my editor delayed my initial request to review the film, he certainly knew of my friendship with the filmmakers, and didn't discourage me from being the one who ultimately submits the review. Hey, it's just a website visited by film lovers. It's not going for a Pulitzer or anything.

But there's also the issue of what to say. I'm really lucky that Noise is a good film, because my job should be easy. In fact, if it sucked, I probably would have just gone easy on myself and left the money on the table to leave it unreviewed. As Noise wasn't assigned to me, but rather, a film I requested, there would have been no point to piss off my wife's friends -- people I was only just getting to know -- to prove some kind of principal of journalistic integrity.

The thing is, though Noise is a very good film, it's not a perfect film. That's not some kind of indictment, it's just a simple fact that is true of most movies, and with which Mark, Beatrice and Greg would no doubt agree. One thing the second viewing of Noise gave me -- which an initial viewing that included the intoxication of attending my first Sundance couldn't give me -- was a couple logistical questions. Why did this happen this way? Why did that happen that way? How was this thread of the plot resolved?

Most of these questions are ultimately not that important, because Noise is a film that is purposefully unresolved in certain ways -- which is one of its towering strengths. It is also more about mood and character than it is about point A to point B to point C plot development, another shrewd attribute. So any minor complaints I have would be too insignificant to prioritize in a 300-word review.

The only question is -- would I consider them more significant if I approached Noise knowing nothing about it? Knowing no one who made it?

Like most questions on this blog, that one's pretty academic. I loved Noise, and was blown away that people I know personally could make such a strong film. That's what will, should, come out in my review. Ha ha -- the fact that it was made by people I know won't come out in the review -- that would indeed be a problem. But the sensation one gets from being impressed by a piece of art, regardless of who made it, and then having that sensation enhanced by knowing the artist -- that's what will come out in my review.

And there's one other unspoken undercurrent of this whole discussion, a truth I can't deny: It probably doesn't matter all that much what I write. Since this is a retroactive review, it doesn't have the ability to help get the film released in the U.S., or change the nature of the DVD distribution agreement. In fact, if I'd been approved to review it when originally requested, there was some chance, however small, that my review could have done this. But now, the film is already filed in its place in cinematic history, and all I'm doing is helping shape the historical perspective on it.

Then again, I am doing something else as well. Sure, I'm clapping my friends on the back, giving them one more chance to feel the love for Noise. But I may also be helping add it to the online rental queues of the people who will read my review. I may just be helping bring the movie to a wider audience, in fact. And when you come right down to it, setting aside the potential monetary gain, prestige, and respect among colleagues, that's what a good filmmaker really wants: for his or her film to simply be seen.

Now all I have to do is write it.